lighthousesystem:

prokopetz:

thechavanator:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: taking the basic tropes of transhuman literature and mashing them up with some other genre so that the technological breakthrough that erases the boundary between people and their tools is something totally off the wall.

Like, usually it’s immortality nanobots or cheap cybertech or people uploading their brains into computers or whatever, but instead let’s make it…

… oh, say, magical girl transformations.

No, seriously: the breakthrough is that somebody figured out how to open-source transformation wands. You can download the plans off the Internet, and knock one together in your garage using readily available materials. Now everybody can transform into sparkly love-powered versions of themselves, and the transformations are getting steadily stranger as millions upon millions of people experiment and push the boundaries of what’s possible.

Where does that take us?

(I was initially going to go with “anime-style martial arts”, but halfway through writing the post I realised that Shaolin Soccer already did that one, so obviously the only solution was to go full shoujo.)

Fielding a few questions from the notes:

1. No going grimdark. No global apocalypses that kill off 90% of the human population, no Akira style body horror, no everybody inevitably transforming into rampaging monsters, none of that. Framing a moral that it’s wrong to aspire to be other than what you are is counter to the core themes of both transhuman literature and magical girl anime.

(Yes, I’m looking at you, Puella Magi Madoka Magica!)

2. That doesn’t mean you can never have people monsterising themselves, mind. Exploring the inevitable growing pains of transformative technologies is very much in keeping with our core themes; the technology in question simply happens to take the “transformative” part considerably more literally than is ordinarily the case.

(Maybe stay away from monster-of-the-week plots, though, unless your premise is, like, a team of magical girl social workers who track down people who’ve made unwise modifications to their wands and get them counseling. These are love-powered transformations, after all; you don’t turn into a face-eating monster out of love unless you’ve got some gnarly issues to work through!)

3. Talking animal companions are admittedly a sticking point. There’s not a huge amount of room for them in the setting as described. Maybe they’re a built-in feature of transformation wands, like magical personal assistant software, and everybody gets their own. Maybe they’ve been thrown for a loop by the open source revolution as much as anyone, and figuring out their place in the new social order is your main plot. Maybe they just aren’t a feature of this particular milieu.

Or you could go with raina-of-winter’s suggestion and run a cyberpunk prequel where talking animal companions are basically pulling a reverse Kyuubey, masterminding a conspiracy to keep transformation wand technology out of the hands of the masses. That also works!

4. No, you don’t have to wear a dress in particular, but were it up to me, a flamboyant, sparkly outfit of some sort would be mandatory. It seems to be an inextricable feature of transformation wands. If you tried to go for a nice, subdued tuxedo, you’d probably end up with a purple brocade tailcoat and matching spats, or something to that effect. Fancy a uniform? It starts at “marching band leader” and just gets showier from there – we’re talking shiny brass buttons for miles.

5. If I were the one writing it, I’d be inclined to say that yes, boys can play too. A transhuman setting where the core transformative technology only works for 50% of the population can easily go to some very weird places, and since I’m coming at this from the perspective of a tabletop game designer, I’m inclined to favour a setup that accommodates a wider range of character concepts.

(That said, there’s always room for a spot of gender fuckery. Perhaps it’s not unheard of for one’s transformed state to involve some degree of gender bending. For some, this an expected and desired outcome; for others, well, they get to learn something about themselves!)

6. I was about to say “no, of course you can’t transform into a car”, but then I reconsidered: if it’s good enough for Revolutionary Girl Utena, who am I to argue? Sure, you can transform into a car. You can have a whole underground racing circuit where people turn into pretty pretty racecars.

(People will probably think you’re a weirdo, though.)

Okay so I know this is probably referring to like, magical girl warrior type stuff, MAYBE cute witch subgenre (actually, that’s probably the more realistic version)

But my brain very kindly informed me “okay, but imagine this with the magical idol singer subgenre” and I have been laughing for several hours, because that concept is genuinely hilarious.

Open-source magical idol singers. EVERYONE gets to be a magical idol. Outlandish costumes and all.

Given that it’s all about pushing boundaries, I see no reason to restrict ourselves to any particular subgenre of magical girl fiction.

So yeah, you’d have a few Sailor Moon style magical girl warriors, though in practice they’d probably be a bigger presence in sports and athletics than in actual combat. I imagine there’d be both a semiscripted pro-wrestling-like version and a marginally more “serious” MMA-like version.

On the flip side, you’d have a lot of folks transforming for vocational skills, assuming the convention whereby transforming into a costume that resembles a given profession enhances your ability to perform that profession; that’s how it works in a fair chunk of the source material (e.g.,
Himitsu no Akko-chan

and its various imitators), so naturally it’s on the table here.

And naturally you’d have plenty of folks using transformation for convenience in their daily lives, as per cute witch anime – though grown-ups are getting in on the act, so “transforming to do your chores” can easily become “transforming to do your taxes”, and I’d love to see what that looks like in practice!

As for the magical idol singer subgenre? It’s practically a given that there will be folks using transformation to do art. Indeed, there’d be folks using transformation as their medium for art, which is one possible avenue for the previously discussed interrogation of monstrosity as a social construct.

(Heck, depending on how far into the magical girl revolution we’re setting our premise, one might even take the opportunity to rehabilitate some of that tedious “dark magical girl” stuff that’s come out in recent years. Folks witching out Madoka Magica style? Make them functional members of society and explore age old questions like how to divide up the house chores when your roommate is a five-dimensional crystal lattice whose maddening vertices frame windows upon the void between the stars.)

There doesn’t seem to be a catch though. The only thing I can see from this is people transforming into their preferred gender in a household/society that’s transphobic or magical girls/etc falling in love with each other in a society that’s homophobic.

Which would be a fucking interesting ass anime that I would watch from start to finish.

But one catch could be that maybe staying transformed can take a lot of energy out of you if you stay like that for a long time. Maybe some people use it as a means to be who they want to be, whether it’s by gender or by their self image and it’s the only way they can feel confident in themselves. Maybe it’s impossible to feel depressed while you’re transformed.

But they gotta change back sometimes to regain their stamina/magic/whatever. Maybe that portion is about them finally getting help for the roots of their problems instead of substituting it for being able to transform.

On another note, what if something like this attracts hostile aliens or all the energy being created by all these transformed magic people attracts more spirits and gives them power to get into all kinds of shenanigans. You can have the warriors fighting and befriending aliens like every day at that point and the witchy-magic girls can either have a fuck ton of spirit companions or be ghost hunters/magical ghost busters.

Someone please make this anime.

prokopetz:

Concept: taking the basic tropes of transhuman literature and mashing them up with some other genre so that the technological breakthrough that erases the boundary between people and their tools is something totally off the wall.

Like, usually it’s immortality nanobots or cheap cybertech or people uploading their brains into computers or whatever, but instead let’s make it…

… oh, say, magical girl transformations.

No, seriously: the breakthrough is that somebody figured out how to open-source transformation wands. You can download the plans off the Internet, and knock one together in your garage using readily available materials. Now everybody can transform into sparkly love-powered versions of themselves, and the transformations are getting steadily stranger as millions upon millions of people experiment and push the boundaries of what’s possible.

Where does that take us?

(I was initially going to go with “anime-style martial arts”, but halfway through writing the post I realised that Shaolin Soccer already did that one, so obviously the only solution was to go full shoujo.)